Category Archives: musics

The Duke of Ook

I’ve been working over some old old old tapes of radio shows, recorded while I was on sabbatical at Stanford in 1979-80. I mentioned KFAT a few days ago, and this wonderful bit of station-break madness came up last night: Alan Seidler, aka The Duke of Ook [1:35], from long before there was an Oook, or anyhow before I’d discovered the alter ego that inhabits me, or vice versa. I’ve had The Duke’s record since it first ummmmm emerged in the mid-1970s, on Blue Goose Records. It’s a Cult Classic, long out of print but maybe gonna be re-released real soon now.

Jazz and ageing and sf

Co-incidentally, over at The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik’s Postscript for Whitney Balliett has this nice bit:

As the music he loved aged, he was often left without a subject, and those of us who revered his writing sometimes wished that he could have discovered in himself a more sympathetic ear for the sounds of newer jazz. But he was too honest to pretend to admire what he didn’t, and it was the great American music of the twenties through the eighties (the seventies, a jazz Indian summer in New York, were a high-water mark for him) that remained his subject… (12 Feb 2007, pg. 31)

In a related vein, my recent encounter with the video of Harlan Ellison reading Prince Myshkin (click on ‘Prince Myshkin’) led me to revisiting the Ellison-edited Again, Dangerous Visions “speculative fiction” anthology of 1972, and that, in turn, provoked this scribbled rumination:

1972 to 2007: 35 years, and still the stories seem fresh –or perhaps it’s that those issues still define what’s important for me, like Ursula LeGuin’s “The Word for World is Forest”, which is at base an examination of Ecology.
And it was Ecology that was the epicenter for my Generation, though my own take on it was more geospatial than energetic.
But the moniker “speculative fiction” (in Ellison’s Introduction to the collection, and elsewhere) is worth considering anew. I just have this feeling that the world would have gone another way if more people had read this stuff…

So here I am, drifting toward joining those “old guys” who remember and value what others have forgotten, or are so young as to never have known…

The Jazz Age

Dan Visel has an interesting meditation on collaboration-and-design over at sidebar (“the back porch of the Institute for the Future of the Book”). It’s all worth a thoughtful read, but for me the money quotes are near the end, where the title of the piece (“the jazz age”) earns its keep:

I’m not arguing that collaboration can’t create something as grand as a symphony. It certainly can. But the things that collaboration can create are qualitatively different, and should be understood as such. (Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects could be brought in here, though that’s been explored before.) When we think of collaboration in music, we don’t think of the classical tradition; we think about jazz. I think that’s a useful reference point: collaborators on networked books could be like jazz musicians, not having a score, but knowing how to improvise within predefined structures like twelve-bar blues. Even free jazz isn’t free, though: when you listen to those old Ornette Coleman records now, the first thing you notice is how carefully structured they seem.
(There’s something interesting about jazz becoming culturally dominant at the height of modernism; perhaps this is a natural response. Around the same time, the Surrealists were denigrating the novel as a form because it was too planned, too rational. They declared a similar preference for the improvised: automatic writing or drawing for example. There’s an enormous amount of Surrealist poetry; a near-complete count of Surrealist novels could be made on two hands. [hmmm? take a look at City Lights offerings])
What we need to be thinking about is how jazz players learn to be jazz players. You can’t stick a classically trained trumpeter in a jazz combo and expect he’ll do a fine job: he won’t. But that’s essentially what we’re trying to do.
And: we need to be looking at how jazz is designed: what sort of structures lend themselves to improvisation and collaboration?

From the archives

A bit more than a year ago, just as I was leaving Virginia, I did an appearance on the Washington & Lee radio station, talking and playing mostly mandocello. I rescued the show from the archives (it’s about an hour, and includes a number of bits recorded with Daniel Heïkalo). At the same time, I wrote a musical rumination giving some background material. Listening and reading those things a year later reminds me of projects I was planning. Now that fall is upon us, high time to start some of them.

Musical Interlude

I can’t praise this enough: American Primitive Vol II from Revenant Records. The liner notes which accompany the two-CD release are a marvel of eloquence and elegant production:

Crucial to the Revenant ethos is the notion of the neglected gem. Our Revenant empire, such as it is, is founded upon the proposition that if the masses reject or ignore it, it just may be worth looking into. Neglected artists may be those ahead of their time, too uncompromising for their own good, whose sense of timing and often decorum was not quite the equal of their imagination. (12)

A special category for neglect is the phantom… Some of these phantoms left behind music of such an otherworldly character that it genuinely retains the power to shock, confound, inspire and sustain today.

Some names: Geeshie Wiley, Elvie Thomas, Nugrape Twins, Homer Quincy Smith, Blues Birdhead

Names too obscure even for Harry Smith…

…The phantom, the revenant, has a special allure. In an age of complete media saturation, where we must, unavoidably, reckon with our artists’ personal minutiae, there is something wonderfully, preversely compelling about art that must stand completely on its own, sand biographical context, since absolutely nothing of any consequence is known about the artist behind the work. It has the quality of a cave painting, except we arguably know more about the personal habits of the creatures who conjured them than we do about our friends Geeshie and Homer. (13)

I am not alone in my enthusiasm: Malcolm at Venerable Music says “There is no easy way to explain just how good this collection is! From the very first track (my first time hearing Homer Quincy Smith), I was completely involved with no turning back. I’ve been listening to these songs all weekend & toward the end of each, I still find myself in true anticipation of the next. The ghosts are evident in this one. Honestly, the best compilation I have heard in while! A true 5-star rating!”

American Primitive Vol I was/is pretty amazing too.

Reading Ingrid Monson’s The African Diaspora

In the context of globalization and music, I happened on this book by the sometime cornetist of the Klezmer Conservatory Band. Some nice tidbits:
Mitchell’s Jazz Kings recorded in the early 1920s in Paris (a bunch of .ram exampes available on the page). The site notes that

In the 1920s the Jazz Kings played a five year residency at the Casino de Paris. Mitchell had his own American restaurant called Mitchell’s in Montmartre and helped Bricktop (Ada Smith-Ducongé) set up her first club, The Music Box in Paris…

Stephane Grappelli remembers that the first jazz tune he heard was Zez Confrey’s “Stumblin’ “, played by Mitchell’s Jazz Kings… (Harris in Monson 2003:109)
Harris goes on to say:

Jazz has, throughout its history, held appeal for people from many different societies and from different places within society, including at its margins. It is rooted in –and is a manifestation of– the human ability to redefine marginality as a “location of radical openness and possibility” (hooks 1990:153)… (Harris in Monson 2003:123)